The Red Badge of Courage (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Crane, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679600442 ISBN 13: 9780679600442

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1993

Synopsis

The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, when its author, an impoverished writer living a bohemian life in New York, was only twenty-three. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous. Crane set out to create "a psychological portrayal of fear." Henry Fleming, a Union Army volunteer in the Civil War, thinks "that perhaps in a battle he might run....As far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself." And he does run in his first battle, full of fear and then remorse. He encounters a grotesquely rotting corpse propped against a tree, and a column of wounded men, one of whom is a friend who dies horribly in front of him. Fleming receives his own "red badge" when a fellow soldier hits him in the head with a gun. "The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battlefields," Ford Madox Ford remarked later, "was gone forever." Shelby Foote, author of The Civil
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From the Back Cover

In 1895 Stephen Crane achieved early fame with his powerful, enigmatic portrayal of a raw recruit's experience of war, The Red Badge of Courage. Although Crane had never experienced battle, he wrote with rare insight and immediacy of his young protagonist's fluctuating emotions, in a style that had a profound influence on American fiction. This selection includes the 1896 coda to the story, 'The Veteran', and the best of Crane's other fiction: the impressionist masterpiece 'The Open Boat'; The Monster, perhaps the most complex and disturbing of all Crane's works; and 'The Blue Hotel; his greatest western story. This edition explores Crane's work from a fresh critical perspective and introduces new research on the imaginative relationship between Crane's novel and the Civil War.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679600442
• ISBN 13: 9780679600442
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Foote Shelby